Micom 2000
Veteran Member
I recently reread a book which I hadn't looked at in almost 30 years but was enamoured of at the time. One of those books you keep because you want to reread it sometime. It was " Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" by Robert Pirsig.
It's really a book on a philosophy of life, but it approaches that as motorcycle repair. In reading it again I thought how apt much of his approach is also to computer repair. In one part of the book he quotes an opening statement of a maintenance manual for bicycles.
"Assembly of Japanese bicycle requires great peace of mind" to the great hillarity of his audience, who had like most of us experienced the assembly of kits using asian directions. Later on he expounds on this theme of approaching a repair with "peace of mind".
Many times when trying to fix some vexing computer problem, I'd get more and more frustrated, and more and more irritatedly frantic and botch the whole job.
Recently I inserted an old driver floppy in an L-T I was working on. It couldn't be read and I found when I ejected it the cover plate was lost in the innards of the FDD. I angrily managed to extract it after many tries and then found that the FDD had a hum and wouldn't read any disks. I was ready to toss the thing but gave myself some time and approached it again. It was a removeable drive and looking at it saw no screws. I found that I could pry the casing apart and that a wire protruding from the back was the floppy cover spring which must have been grounding. I reassembled it and it worked without problem.
By walking away from the problem I was able to solve it with that "peace of mind" approach.
One of the things I have learned over years in ressurecting computers is that sometimes just leaving it alone for a time allows you to approach it again "fresh" with "Peace of mind".
Lawrence
It's really a book on a philosophy of life, but it approaches that as motorcycle repair. In reading it again I thought how apt much of his approach is also to computer repair. In one part of the book he quotes an opening statement of a maintenance manual for bicycles.
"Assembly of Japanese bicycle requires great peace of mind" to the great hillarity of his audience, who had like most of us experienced the assembly of kits using asian directions. Later on he expounds on this theme of approaching a repair with "peace of mind".
Many times when trying to fix some vexing computer problem, I'd get more and more frustrated, and more and more irritatedly frantic and botch the whole job.
Recently I inserted an old driver floppy in an L-T I was working on. It couldn't be read and I found when I ejected it the cover plate was lost in the innards of the FDD. I angrily managed to extract it after many tries and then found that the FDD had a hum and wouldn't read any disks. I was ready to toss the thing but gave myself some time and approached it again. It was a removeable drive and looking at it saw no screws. I found that I could pry the casing apart and that a wire protruding from the back was the floppy cover spring which must have been grounding. I reassembled it and it worked without problem.
By walking away from the problem I was able to solve it with that "peace of mind" approach.
One of the things I have learned over years in ressurecting computers is that sometimes just leaving it alone for a time allows you to approach it again "fresh" with "Peace of mind".
Lawrence
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